


Home Truths

by concernedlily



Series: Home Truths [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Oh No He's Hot, Post-Season/Series 06, past Keith/Adam, past Shiro/Adam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 20:36:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concernedlily/pseuds/concernedlily
Summary: Shiro finds something out and realises something else.





	Home Truths

“We are not talking about this,” Keith says flatly and Shiro has to agree it’s not the greatest topic of campfire conversation, although at least Pidge has already gone to sleep in the green lion, using her fluffy little pets as a pillow, and Krolia is out prowling somewhere with the wolf, finding some unlucky thing to be on the fire for breakfast. 

“Why not?” Lance says. “It’s okay if you don’t have a story to tell, Keith! Someone’s gonna want your alien ass sometime.”

“Oh, like you’ve lost your virginity, Lance,” Hunk scoffs, making Lance splutter, and then he swings round and says to Keith, “seriously, though, have you?”

“Yeah,” Keith snaps, his face crumpling straight after with regret. 

Lance, never one to read a room, seems delighted. “Seriously? Come on, tell us.”

Keith hesitates and his gaze slides to Shiro, unwillingly. He’s hunched in on himself, more guarded than Shiro has seen him since waking up in the pod on Black. 

“No _way_ ,” Lance hoots. “You and Shiro? He could do so much better!”

Keith looks furious. “Fuck you,” he says, so obviously meaning it that Lance and Hunk both fall quiet, cowed, and look relieved when Keith bursts up from the ground and storms off. 

“Tell him we were just messing around,” Hunk says guiltily when Shiro gets up to follow him. 

***

Keith is curled on Black’s massive paw, its eyes lit and its head tilted protectively down to him, as if he needs comfort, and Shiro slows as he thinks of another reason why Keith might be so defensive about his first experiences of sex. He’d bounced around different families for a long time, not all of them good, and Shiro has always had the sense that Keith thinks Shiro needs protecting from how it was for him before Shiro found him for the Garrison. 

“Hey,” he calls up and Keith takes a long time to look down at him enough for Shiro to interpret it as anything like welcome. Once Shiro starts to scramble up, though, he moves immediately to help, Black’s height being a little more difficult to navigate with only one arm. 

“Are you all right?” Shiro says tentatively. Black is familiar and cool under him in this planet’s warm night air. He pats it and it raises its head away from them up to its usual sentinel posture, as if telling him he’s got this. “Keith, you know you can talk to me, right? If you want to. If someone hurt you, or -“

“No!” Keith says. “God, shut up. It wasn’t anything like that.”

“Okay,” Shiro says. Keith takes a deep breath, then nothing, and Shiro prompts gently, “You want to tell me what it was like?” It’s none of his business, and he’s not going to insist, but whatever it is is clearly a sore topic and he can’t help wanting to make it better, if he can. 

“God,” Keith mutters again. He looks away. “If I’d thought at the time I’d have to have this conversation…” another deep breath, this one ragged. “Although if I’d thought we might it wouldn’t have happened, I guess.”

“Okay,” Shiro says slowly. 

“It didn’t mean anything,” Keith says desperately, his big eyes turned up to Shiro, his face pale. “Just... how bad it all was. He really loved you.”

“Keith,” Shiro says and Keith shuts his mouth with an audible click of teeth, his lips thin and unhappy. “Are you telling me -”

“Adam,” Keith says miserably and Shiro can’t help his recoil. “Shit, Shiro, I’m sorry. It was awful of me, I know, but you were _dead_ , and they kept saying it was your fault, and I broke into your place after the memorial and he was there. It just kind of happened but never again, I never even saw him after that, I’m so sorry.”

“Okay,” Shiro says automatically. He seriously doesn’t know what to do with this information but Keith is shaking, afraid of this in a way he’s never been afraid of fighting universe-conquering aliens with their giant robot lions, and he knows what to do with that. 

He pulls Keith close and Keith falls into him, clinging, his face hot in the crook of Shiro’s neck. “It’s okay, Keith. I understand, I’m not mad at you.”

It’s true. He’s not mad at Keith. He’s mad at Adam. 

***

He turns over in the narrow bunk again, and once again it doesn’t help. 

Adam, with his bitten-pink lips and big clever hands that Shiro had enjoyed so much, putting them on Keith. Not as he is now, strong and secure, having his mother back and being a Paladin of Voltron; the rebellious, skinny Keith Shiro had hugged goodbye at the Kerberos launch. The one who’d flown hoverbikes like he wished they could break atmosphere and never quite looked comfortable in his cadet uniform and pushed away the kids in his class and gave everything he had to Shiro instead. 

He can’t stand the idea of them together, but he can’t stop thinking about it. Trying to master his emotions is failing him this time: every part of him just rejects the whole idea of Adam and Keith together, an instinctive, almost physical reaction; his skin feels too small every time he pictures it, helplessly. What had Keith said? That it was after the memorial - Shiro’s memorial - and surrounded by Shiro’s things. In his mind’s eye it’s sloppy and quick, a raw physical connection with little but grief and Shiro’s ghost between them, but no less needed or real for that. The idea of them turning to one another like that makes him ache, and he doesn’t know why.

They hadn’t even particularly liked each other, as far as Shiro knew. They’d been polite for Shiro’s sake, tolerated one another, especially at the beginning, but as Keith had gotten older and Shiro’s relationship with Adam had gotten shakier, he’d gradually stopped inviting Keith to activities with both of them and started seeing him alone, mostly outside the house. Keith had implicitly preferred that anyway; once Adam and Shiro had broken up he’d spent the last three months before the Kerberos mission over all the time, his hunger for Shiro’s company going unspoken mostly because Shiro had wanted Keith there as badly as he’d wanted to be there, reminding him that at least someone understood why he had to go and would be waiting when he got back.

And Keith had been, even though neither of them could have imagined how Shiro would return. He always is.

He turns over again, pissed at himself. Just as he’s resettling a massive weight lands on him, throwing him just momentarily into that cold part of him where the Champion lives. 

It’s fine; he’s fine. “Come on, buddy,” he says, wheezing, and the wolf snuffles amiably into his hand and lets him push her partway over in the space between him and the wall so he’s less in danger of being crushed. She rests her head on his hip and the yellow gleaming pinpricks disappear as she closes her eyes.

Well, that’s one way to end the tossing and turning. He sighs and scratches the wolf’s head, mashing his face into what passes for cushions in the lions’ spartan living quarters to try to find a cool spot.

It had been Keith’s first time. Adam would have taken the lead: he enjoyed that. Shiro can almost feel the cushions of his old couch beneath him, how Adam would have pressed Keith back into them with the teasing kisses he preferred. Keith’s hair, always past regulation length, would’ve been uncombed; had Adam run his hands through it? Maybe while Keith was sucking him, his first time with a cock sliding into his mouth and over his tongue, learning how to make a man melt beneath him. Or had it been less co-ordinated, a messy grind, Adam’s hands on Keith’s compact, deceptively powerful body, Keith crying out as he learned what it’s like to be touched by someone else?

“Get it together,” he mutters, and knocks his head back into the pillow.

“Shiro?” Keith says, his voice scratchy with sleep. “Hey, sorry, I didn’t realise she was bothering you.” He gives a low whistle and the wolf grumbles but stands up, squashing Shiro’s kidneys for good measure as she jumps off the bunk and goes obediently to his side.

Shiro sits up. “It’s okay.” There’s always an ambient light in the lions, bespeaking their true role as warships rather than transports, and he can see Keith’s fingers curling in the rough hair on the top of the wolf’s head. She’s leaning against his leg and Shiro knows from experience how nice that can be, the comforting warmth of her: she’s looks ferocious, but Keith raised her to be affectionate. He adds, “I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh,” Keith says. Shiro’s gaze drags up his body despite himself. They’re short on both clothes and opportunities to clean the ones they do have, so Keith is sleeping in only boxer shorts and Shiro is deeply conscious that he’s also wearing just underwear under the thin sheet pooled over his legs. Keith is still lean, all scarred tautness and sinew, with his long acrobat’s legs, slim hips, sleekly-muscled chest: a practical body, a fighter’s body, not the exercised physiques they’d both had at the Garrison. 

He’s stunning, and Shiro has just been thinking about him having sex, and he realises with a distant inevitability that his cock is thickening under the folds of the sheet.

“Well, night,” Keith says awkwardly, and Shiro murmurs something, his brain offline, and lies back down to the sounds of Keith and the wolf negotiating space in the bunk at the other end of the room.

Now, he understands his reaction. He’s jealous; but not of his best friend sleeping with his ex.

***

He gets a lucky break, for once. Pidge’s latest scientific experiment needs some help, and he’s the only one who both has a jetpack and isn’t flying a lion. When she’s done with him he cuts her off partway into hailing Keith to let him know Shiro is coming back and instead shuffles to her tiny den, wedges himself into what might be a chair, and closes his eyes, leaving her baffled in the cockpit. 

Away from Black - from Keith - he can see things more clearly. It had taken him a while to get over Adam’s ultimatum, but being thrown into fighting for his life on a regular basis had had a way of putting some perspective on things, and in the end Adam had been more right than he could have ever imagined about the risk involved. He’d loved Adam deeply, and he knew Adam had loved him; he can understand better than anyone why Adam, suffused with the what-might’ve-beens Shiro knows would have tormented him, and a wildly grieving Keith might have turned to each other. He can accept it: if only he could just stop _thinking_ about it.

What appears to be a garbage version of his own face watches him, judgmentally. 

***

They land again twelve vargas later. Lance and Hunk are the first ones to exclaim about the familiar feel of the desert planet, twin yellow suns bowling on the endless horizon aside. That’s where Keith finds him, getting covered in red dust from sitting on a rock trying to decipher the signals from what Coran assured him was an Altean device for finding fresh water. 

“You’re avoiding me,” he accuses, and Shiro feels guilty at the pain in his voice. Keith has been so honest with him, maybe since rescuing him from Earth, at least since they were stuck on that planet together after their battle with Zarkon. Shiro owes him the same, but he hasn’t figured out how to put it into words yet. “You said you weren’t mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” he says, and turns to look at Keith. It hits him again: Keith’s red-and-black softened by the golden light, his old t-shirt and jacket small on him now, exposing more of his collarbones and a pale line of flat stomach, his pants even tighter on his thighs than the close-fitting Blades suit. Keith’s always been beloved to Shiro and now he’s beautiful too.

“So you’re coming back? I know Pidge doesn’t even have room for you,” Keith says hopefully. 

Shiro hesitates, and Keith’s face falls. He’s almost in silhouette, slender and straight-backed, and when he steps forward Shiro can see that the look in his eyes is despairing. He says, “Tell me what I can do, Shiro. Please, this can’t be the thing I lose you for.”

“You’ll never lose me,” Shiro says instantly and Keith’s mouth twists. “We don’t give up on each other, right?”

“Then come back to the black lion,” Keith says passionately.

“I will. I’m just thinking about some stuff. It’s all right.”

He manages a smile and pats the rock next to him. Keith searches his face for a second before climbing up to sit next to him. He shuffles in close, nervously, and Shiro puts the (useless anyway) device down so he can wrap his arm around Keith’s shoulders. Keith sighs as soon as they’re touching, although he’s still a little stiff against Shiro’s side. 

“I shouldn’t have told you,” he says. 

“Well, I know now,” Shiro says, tactless. Keith shifts and he turns his face into Keith’s hair in silent apology.

“I thought you were dead,” Keith says again, unhappy and raw, and when Shiro angles his body to Keith, inviting, Keith turns into him and buries his face in Shiro’s shirt, his fingers bunching up the material. 

When he’d first been captured he’d thought about everyone he knew believing him to be dead; after the first time he’d been thrown into the arena, he’d accepted that they would soon be right. He couldn’t bring himself to think about what it might look like for them, feel like, Keith left alone, his other friends, Adam and colleagues at the Garrison, the handful of distant family he has left. This is the first time he’s really faced it, with Keith’s quiet agony in his arms. 

“I’m here,” he murmurs, and gives into the temptation to press a kiss to Keith’s forehead, and linger. 

Keith takes a shuddering breath and pulls back to look him in the eyes. The idea of not touching him is impossible; Shiro let’s his hand slide to Keith’s shoulder instead. 

“He had a part of you I didn’t have,” Keith says, and then straightens himself, his eyes glittering with that familiar resolve of being about to do something reckless and wonderful, Shiro’s gaze caught irresistibly by the stubborn set of his full lips. “That was all it was. I wanted _you_. I’ve always wanted you.”

“Keith,” Shiro says, and Keith kisses him. 

He’s scared and too brash with it, kissing fast and frantic like he thinks this is his one chance and he has to get everything at once. It’s not good, but it’s Keith, and a promise of _everything_ , and that makes it great. Keith’s nose bumps Shiro’s cheek hard and Keith makes a choked sound and starts to draw away, his grip on Shiro’s shirt going limp.

Kissing Adam used to feel like flying, a starfield opening up ahead of his shuttle. Kissing Keith is grounding, peaceful; he’s finally made it home. He slides his palm up the side of Keith’s throat and into his hair and pulls him back into the kiss.

Keith’s mouth softens against Shiro’s and he feels the rush of it through his entire body. He rubs his thumb against against Keith’s cheek, against the scar he’d put there, encouraging, and sucks gently on Keith’s chapped lower lip. Had he always had that? Too long living on spaceships; he indulges himself, just for a moment, in the idea of kissing Keith on the green grass of Earth, under the cherry blossoms, before he brings himself back to the moment, the curve of Keith’s head that fits perfectly in his hand, the slight crick in his neck as he bends to the best angle. Keith wraps his arms around Shiro’s neck, presses closer, and Shiro deepens the kiss. 

It’s another couple of minutes before Keith truly relaxes and that’s - a revelation. All of Keith’s flawless instincts and grace joyfully focused on Shiro. Kisses tumble into one another and Shiro lies back on the rock, barely feeling the pointy bits poking into him, just to be touching everywhere they can, to feel Keith’s weight sprawled on him, comfortable and confident enough to turn aggressive, exploring Shiro’s mouth with his tongue like he owns it: he does.

Shiro’s lips feel bruised, well-used, when Keith finally pulls away, reluctantly, with that glazed look Shiro associates with communicating with the lions. Keith’s mouth looks just like Shiro’s feels and he puts a fingertip to it, filled with wonder at having the right to. As soon as he’s back with Shiro he bites down, playful, and Shiro takes the outcropping digging uncomfortably into his lower back to wrap his leg around Keith’s thighs.

“They’re ready to go,” Keith says. He rests his chin on Shiro’s chest, looking up at him so both of them go cross-eyed. He’s smiling. “You didn’t find any water.”

“No,” Shiro says, and urges Keith up to him for another slow kiss. He’s found something better.


End file.
